A Journal of the Flood Year

It's the mid 21st century, so icecaps have melted, sea levels have risen, and the US has constructed the Wall: a gigantic flood barrier that stretches down the Atlantic coast and expands the surface area of America by around a third. Oh and cybersex is the norm, reproduction occurs in vitro, everyone stays young (just hop into a Juvenator), routine tasks are performed by robots, and political subversives are the Excluded, condemned to northern gulags or the fetid swamps surrounding the abandoned cities of the south. But respectable engineer William Fowke discovers the Wall has sprung a leak. Cue one man against the system, on the run, in love, etc. I don't think I've ever seen quite so many sci-fi and action movie cliches stuffed into one book. I'd better add that it matters not a whit: Ely's prose is so elegantly spare and his sense of pace so effortless that this watery world is not only credible but poignant as an imagining of irreversible losses that are already in the process of occurring. And the kind of mourning that masquerades as heady anticipation might just be what futuristic fiction is really for.